On 5/28/2012 5:08 PM, Anya Shyrokova wrote:
My main thought is that the statement: "Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording" is somewhat self-contradictory. Jargon exists in order to increase precision and decrease vagueness/ unnecessary wording. That is why academics, or really any community of professionals, tend to develop it. However, if one uses too much of it, the reader begins to feel that he needs a higher level degree to understand what's going on. People who are not good writers tend to poorly handle the balance between needing to use common language and being precise.
The great advantage of using a wiki to create an encyclopedia is that it allows a community to collaborate in building it. As Anya's insight indicates, communities tend to develop their own language in order to communicate about issues. These languages invariably specialize to meet community needs, like conveying precise meanings, and become a little challenging for outsiders to understand (our own community jargon illustrates the point quite well).
Well, the great advantage of creating an encyclopedia on the web is that it enables us to use hyperlinks. In this environment, writing that uses a specialized vocabulary should take advantage of hyperlinks in order to explain the language. In theory, that alone would be able to solve most of the problem here.
I agree that academics, among others, may need to improve their writing styles in order to better serve our readers. But I think there are more fundamental cultural issues at work as well, and addressing some of those might produce an encyclopedia in which it's easier for writers to stick with language they find accurate and precise. These issues include: concerns about "overlinking" in article text; hostility to "redlinks" for articles not yet created; work that focuses exclusively on single articles rather than how they fit into the context of the encyclopedia; greater interest in working on new, hot topics than older, established knowledge; and lack of skill being applied to crafting articles about core concepts in many fields. For that matter, a stronger and more effectively utilized Wiktionary would help as well.
--Michael Snow